Chronic stress indirectly harms society's health

The perennial cause of ill health in unequal industrial societies may well prove to be the chronic stress young adults suffer at the very period of their life where they are most likely to conceive children[23].

The epigenetic revolution definitely casts a new light upon recent social-epidemiology observations. The state of a society’s health may largely depend on how its present members lived their primal period. At that time, each one of them either acquired a lifelong resilience under good primal conditions or, due to less favorable ones, started a difficult life for some reason or other.

In modern times, parents-to-be have been more and more prone to suffer from societal stress, at least as long as their professional/economic status weren't safely established. Alas, they therefore constituted an unfavorable primal environment of children-to-be, that is, of 20th century society. This is what the rising number of american children with mental disorders between 1987 and 2007 seems to confirm. Incidentally, the latter observation forwarns an even larger progression in the proportion of people who might soon qualify for SSI or SSDI than the ''one in 184 to one in 76'' already observed over the same period [70].

Inequality and the resulting societal stress are not new: They prevailed from the very beginning of our industrial era. As early as the mid-nineteenth century – the period of the freest press in the United States – popular papers run by factory girls in Lowell (Massachusetts) referred to the renting of themselves to a business owner as “wage slavery” [23]. This was considered degrading at the time. Since then, aside from a transitory period of substantial social improvements (see The Rich Don’t Always Win: The forgotten triumph over plutocracy that created the American middle class, 1900-1970[24]), with all due deference to Steven Pinker we certainly cannot pretend that things have changed toward the better, especially toward less stress for all, winners included.​Very low incomes are not new either: “There’s [still] only one way you can force people to accept an intolerable lifestyle”, says Ishmael to Julie in Daniel Quinn’s famous novel [25]. “Yeah,” she says, “you have to lock up the food.” In this respect, besides the societal stress we all suffer from, parents with very low incomes, who must fight for their everyday food, are subject to an additional handicap: they can’t possibly provide their upcoming offspring with enough sustained attention and secure, affective presence throughout its primal life. Should not this additional handicap actually be considered a primaldeterminant of the well-known lack of working-poor social mobility [26]? It certainly should.